Out of my comfort zone

I had to pack up my lunchbox and water bottles this week and move to a friend’s home about 70 miles away for some temp work. I was much more anxious than I’d have predicted — kind of like a recovering drunk, I guess, leaving her support group. I wasn’t taking my bike, didn’t really know the walking places, wouldn’t be in my kitchen and wouldn’t have round-the-clock access to livestrong.com and my obsessive calorie-counting.

It’s been interesting. My biggest NSV (non-scale victory) has been coming home mid-week this first Wednesday, snacking all the way home, entering my calories-in and calories-out on the computer and eating nothing else that night. I don’t expect I’ll have lost anything by the end of these two weeks, but maybe I won’t have gained either which, I guess, will be an SD (scale detente).

There are wonderful places to walk around my friend’s condo (and more dogs than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life) and lots of people out at all hours walking. Combined with 15 daily minutes of yoga, that’s good exercise for these 10 work days. (Even with the clearly marked bike lanes everywhere, I’m chicken to ride my bike in city traffic.)

When I lived in Charlotte for 10 years, I was a single mother of two, working my first fulltime job. My friend’s condo is in our old neighborhood and what’s surprising is not how much has changed in the 23 years since I left, but how little. Surrounded by that old environment, I recognize suffocating feelings of loneliness and dependency, wanting nurture. Which translate to wanting to eat. I did fairly well recognizing and managing that until Thursday night when I was tired. Cravings + fatigue = deadly tendency to eat in effort to “feel better.”